Advances in text comprehension: commentary and final perspective.

The articles in this special issue present data, theory and applications of the field of Discourse Processes. This commentary identifies some of the challenges this field has faced in its attempt to understand the mechanisms of discourse comprehension and production to scale up the research to applications. The prevailing models emphasize the interaction between data-driven and conceptually driven processes and the importance of representational constraints in guiding discourse processing. The field embraces a wide range of methodologies that are illustrated in this special issue, including brain imaging, eye tracking, thing aloud protocols, reading times, recall, summarization and question answering. The tasks include text comprehension, search through large repositories of electronic texts and learning from advanced multimedia environments. The major claim in the commentary is that researchers need to conduct deeper analyses of the information in the materials (texts, tasks) and world knowledge before they can offer defensible generalizations about cognitive processes and real world applications. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]